Introduction to Reproducible Authorship and Publishing

5 Minutes

Learning Objectives

• Apply basic markdown syntax to change document appearance
• Describe how formatting can change document properties
• Show how to dynamically generate citations for a document
• Know how to generate multiple formats from a single written text

Before we get started

• Install pandoc
• Install editor?

Our lesson today will introduce a new way to write in less time, with less stress, and in a way that is reusable. Take a look at this document:

How long would it take to turn this document into a word document, a web page, and a set of slides?

Open your terminal and type:

pandoc

Scholarly documents are a critical part of your academic and research workflow, be they lab notebooks, syllabi, papers, theses, CV’s, or blog posts. How you write (word, latex, text editor) and how thise works are presented are published (pdf from a publisher) are two separate steps. In our open publishing workflow we’re going to separate writing and formatting in two separate steps.

There are four skills that are needed to make this workflow function:

1. Add formatting into the text.
2. Formatting elements can change the document structure.
   
3. Specific formatting can manage citations and automatically produce reference lists.
4. A single document can be organized such that it can generate multiple output.

Introduce plain text version of the example. Exercise! What might we need to do to make this text into the formatted version?

1. Find formatting
2. Find date
3. Find a citation
4. What do you need to make slides?

By the end of the workshop you’ll have modified the text so that it can generate multiple outputs.

Resources

• A
• B

Next: Basic Markdown